Future of Web Design 2009

Posted: Mon 21 Sep, 2009

On Monday 14th September 2009 I had the opportunity to present on behalf of Fuzzy Orange at the Glasgow leg of the Future of Web Design tour, covering the awesome topic of ‘Getting Started with Adobe AIR’.

Carsonified do a fantastic job of organising these events, and, as with any event, getting the blend of topics and speakers right, particularly over different days, different locations and different audiences, can be a real challenge. As a developer it was interesting presenting to a design-focused FOWD audience, more so as the initial presentation involved setting up the Flex/AIR project from scratch and basic ActionScript 3 functions to initiate the application.

By the end of the hour-long tutorial, we had built a unique desktop mp3 player application that loaded songs using a drag and drop interface. The application also made use of the remote data functions available through the HTTP Service classes and Flash remoting to use a ColdFusion component drawing data from the LastFM API.

Some of the feedback floating across Twitter was that the Glasgow session was very, some said too, focused on development. If I had more time, I would have loved to have showcased the design features available using Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst to streamline the design-to-development workflow, which certainly would have been of extra interest to the design crowd, but sadly an hour was not enough. I was happy to hear that following the presentation, a few people were keen to start playing around with AIR (some from scratch, others going back to something they haven't looked at for a while) to see what they could come up with, which at the end of the day is a fantastic result.

I would like to thank everyone at Carsonified and the FOWD event team for organising a fantastic tour and for having me on the schedule, and to Fuzzy Orange for letting me step in to present on their behalf.

Sadly, there are no more kinder eggs to give away, but I can leave you with links to reviews at Graeme Pirie’s blog and on 360 Innovate and a reminder of that age old saying; “Gimp love is good love.”

The source code and presentation application will be available to download from the Fuzzy Orange site soon, and if there are any questions about anything covered in the tutorial, please feel free to contact me.